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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Product Spotlight: Address Books

Have you ever just stepped over the magazine subscription cards at the store?

Take a second and think of how many of these cards are discarded as "trash" to everyone at the store...

Or all the ones that clutter your home and recycling bin since every magazine seems to need at least 8 of them...

We have put these cards to good use in a mini address books. :)

Now every time we go to the grocery store I get super excited to "clean-up" the magazines some. In fact, the silver lining to my ridiculously long appointment last week was that I got a ton of magazine subscription cards once I ransacked all of the magazines and organized everything in boredom. It is a really fun instant gratification item to collect!!!

These pocket size address books pack plenty of space to keep all your addresses in this ever expanding digital world where some still like snail mail. Each address book is made inside either a discarded metro/transit card or gift card. Inside the card and a thicker back cover there is a range of (20)magazine subscription cards from a variety of magazines. In the back there are some "blank" pages for notes that are made with recycled paper from either previously printed paper or alternative recycled paper products.

Address book measures: 2.5"X3.5" The NYC metro card address books can be seen

Each page is cut one at a time due to the individuality of the address fields and sizing on the card. The process takes some extra time, but is well worth it considering it is only this amount of time no extra fossil fuels or energy are utilized in the making of this project because it is made from pure human power!!! I laugh to myself about these shirts with my human power slogan I am mulling over... Let's see if it sticks. Back to the topic- Once all the pages are individually cut they are punched and spiral bound all together in small batches.

When you use a gift card do you know what happens to your old gift cards? If the store doesn't recycle them you can always save them for us ;) If for whatever reason sending us your cards and junk is out of the question - I discovered this awesome new station at Bust Buy the other day. I went looking for this special version of Tron for Kevin, and they had this awesome recycling receptacle in front. It has so many recycling varieties including gift cards, plastic bags, rechargeable batteries, cd's and jewel cases, old cables ink cartridges and more. I had no idea of just how much tech stuff Best Buy Recycles until I read this great article here.

When we started these address books the collecting became an anthropological study of consumerism to me. These cards encapsulate a flawed idea in currency from a zero-waste stand point when you think of how frequently we waste a vast variety of gift cards, transit cards, and hotel keys. At Make Shop Live, we take these accumulating scraps of plastic and turn them into the sturdy covers to the pocket size address books, seen in the below picture. We collect and accept all kinds of plastic cards rescuing them from the trash and re purposing them. They are great for traveling and we have many families of soldiers who purchase them for their convenient small size.

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